bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, pp. 13–14
(In this excerpt from a book he is writing about the Canadian foreign service, the author argues that foreign service officers must do much more to explain their profession to the Canadian public.)
The process by which a decision was reached in 1986 to close the embassy in Quito (and six other posts) was simple and brutal. The prime minister had ordered his cabinet ministers to make major cuts in their department’s establishments. Since this was to honour his 1984 campaign pledge to reduce the size of the federal government, he also ordered that the cuts be real and visible to the public, not mere number juggling. Treasury Board, the committee of ministers which oversees government spending, set reduction targets for each department for each of the next few years. Then the minister and deputy minister of each department selected activities or programs which could be scrapped to achieve the desired reduction. In the case of External Affairs, it was agreed by Mr. Clark and Mr. James Taylor, the Under-Secretary, that closing a number of foreign missions was the best way to make substantial economies in a clear and visible way. Accordingly, each of the assistant deputy ministers (ADMs) responsible for a geographic region was told to pick posts in his or her region for possible sacrifice. Naturally there was a good deal of angry resistance to this from the ADMs but in the end argument was in vain and seven of the smaller embassies or consulates were identified for closure. They were Philadelphia in the USA; Hamburg, Marseille and Helsinki in Europe; Perth in the Asia-Pacific region; Quito in Latin America; and Abu Dhabi in the Middle East.
This efficient procedure might well have been adapted from the method employed by Jim Pattison, the millionaire Vancouver car dealer so admired by some politicians. It is said of Pattison that he held a sales meeting once a week and the salesman with the fewest sales to report was fired on the spot.
None of the posts that was closed was targetted because it was not needed, or because it was not earning its way with trade promotion, or because our relations with the host country were being broken. All were chosen because they would render the required savings and create the least amount of public reaction. In one case the gamble failed. The Finnish community in Canada took umbrage at the thought that Helsinki would be closed and mounted a well-organized lobbying campaign. To their voices were joined those of the exporting and foreign policy communities, both of which saw the Canadian embassy in Finland as having great value not only in itself, but also as a listening post next door to the Soviet Union. Against this chorus the government could not prevail and Helsinki was dropped from the list. Evidently the Ecuadorian community did not have the same voting clout or was less well organized.
There is an old saying that the exception proves the rule. In the case of the 1986 post closings, the really interesting fact is not that the Finnish community successfully resisted the move, but that this was virtually the only public or widespread protest made against the government’s decision. George Grande, in his column in the Ottawa Citizen, suggested that any proposed closure of a Canadian mission should be examined closely by a parliamentary committee, the public and the media. But if the closure of posts is important enough to require this kind of scrutiny, why did the government’s decision in 1986 draw so little fire, especially when no fewer than seven posts were involved? (An even longer list of posts had been closed in 1984 by the previous government.) There are several obvious reasons and one not so obvious.
There were in fact some pro forma protests. A few members of parliament wrote letters or asked questions in the House, and the parliamentary committee responsible for reviewing the operations of the departments of External Affairs and National Defence did examine the reasons given for the closures. With a government majority in the House of Commons and on the committee, however, it was unlikely the decision would be seriously questioned or overturned. More significantly, Opposition politicians did not see in this an issue with which to excite public outrage against the government (the exception of course was those Opposition and government MPs with large Finnish communities in their ridings)
The “public” in Mr. Grande’s phrase did grumble a bit. The Canadian Exporters’ Association lamented the loss of posts that were providing assistance to exporting companies, but accepted External’s argument that opening some new one-officer trade missions in places like Osaka, Shanghai, Orlando and Pittsburgh was a good redeployment of scarce resources. The foreign policy community for its part did not perceive the posts involved (with the exception again of Helsinki) as crucial to Canada’s ongoing involvement in major international issues: disarmament, aid to the poorest developing nations and settlement of regional conflict. The protests from both groups were muted and for the record.
The media, those tireless guardians of the national interest, not only failed to start a hue and cry but actually ridiculed the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO), which did protest, saying that the latter were griping because a few cushy sinecures had been snatched from their grasp!
Thus, for reasons of political partisanship or special interest, those groups which might have protested the decision in a vigorous way did not. In fact it is a kind of backhanded tribute to the political and bureaucratic architects of the decision that they were able to choose six posts which individually and cumulatively had so little widespread support from the Canadian public. It was rather like that vaudeville act where a magician deftly removes watch, belt, tie and wallet from an unsuspecting member of the audience while the rest look on with glee.
But this was not a magic act. Something real was lost. In six cities of the world, the Canadian presence was diminished. The department could argue that a redeployment of resources balanced this off by increasing the Canadian presence in several other places through the creation of miniposts; but this is more sleight-of-hand since the original reason for the closures was to make real and significant cutbacks.
The crux of the matter is that those who ought to have opposed the decision strenuously — politicians, special interest groups, the media — did not do so because they believed the general public would not support them. They believed, probably rightly, that the public has no real understanding of the rationale for a foreign service and so they lowered their voices.
What is lacking in Canada is a solid grasp by the general public of our place in the world and our need for instruments such as embassies and a foreign service to accomplish our global objectives. In the general public, understanding of such things is influenced by romantic spy novels and the memoirs of diplomats such as Pearson and Ritchie. But in the foreign service we are not spies; and the world that Pearson and Ritchie describe is the world of war and the early post-war period, not the vastly changed scene of the 1990s.
Those who should be providing a better comprehension of Canada’s role in the world are doing a very lukewarm job of it. The newspaper, magazine and television media do, it is true, a reasonable job of presenting the news and the issues behind the news (although gaps remain; they still have not explained, for example, after years of coverage, who was fighting whom in Lebanon and why). Their coverage of Canada’s positions on international trade and political issues is increasingly sophisticated. But they continue to regard the foreign service as a butt for jokes. “Cookie-pushers” ’, Charles Lynch called our diplomats, hanging his contempt on that ancient shibboleth about cocktail parties. Politicians are guilty too. Pierre Trudeau thought The New York Times was an adequate substitute for our network of posts abroad. He and other prime ministers have sometimes used the foreign service as a parking lot for cronies or people who had to be pensioned off. A few of these patronage appointees, true enough, have done quite an adequate job (often thanks to energetic, behind-the-scenes work by their career foreign service staff), but others have been disastrous. What has been most harmful in the long run is the message these appointments send to the Canadian public, namely that the heads of our embassies and high commissions and consulates do not need professional expertise in international relations; that anyone with a high public profile in our own country can be a good ambassador to another one.
Those most responsible, however, for the poor public understanding of Canada’s place in the world are foreign service officers themselves. We have done virtually nothing over the years to communicate to Canadians what it is that makes our work relevant to their day-to-day interests. We have not challenged attacks on our role by politicians and journalists in a broad and strategic way. We have instead been content to let the supposed glamour of our work protect us and we have trusted our political masters to repay our silent loyalty with privileged status. That worked well enough at one time, but in these days of aggressive, investigative journalism it will not, and we must be prepared to justify our existence in terms which the average Canadian will understand and accept.
Our position is tenuous now because over the years we have not maintained rigorous standards of professional skill. We have recruited generalists and then left them on their own for thirty years to develop required skills any way they could. That approach has produced a small handful of brilliant achievers and a larger corps of competent but unmotivated “lifers”. While every other profession in Canada has implemented continuing education programs to introduce new concepts to its members and to upgrade their skills, we still assume that our officers can get all they need to know from reading The Globe and Mail. No wonder politicians and the public think that anyone can do an ambassador’s job!
My view (others may disagree) is that Canada needs a professional foreign service institute, associated with a university, which would produce a yearly crop of Master’s level graduates with training in international relations from among whom the department could recruit. The institute would also provide continuing education courses for the foreign service and, in its academic role, serve as a crucible for new ideas and new approaches to Canada’s international relations.
There is of course a need for people with internationalist skills in places other than the foreign service. Banks, large companies, provincial governments, other federal government departments and universities all employ specialists in one area or another of international relations and would benefit from having a pool of qualified graduates from which to draw. Over time we would develop in Canada a network of skilled foreign relations professionals in business in government and in academia. They would be able to work effectively together and to communicate information rapidly and efficiently amongst themselves, like specialists in any profession. Their shared understanding of our national objectives in international relations would make transfers and secondments amongst them relatively easy, and this would reinforce the strength and flexibility of the foreign service by providing it with a much deeper pool of expertise from which to draw when new crises arise on the world scene.
It is imperative for Canadians to have a clearer understanding of Canada’s place in the world and of the tools, such as a professional foreign service, which are required to achieve our national objectives. This understanding must come in the first instance from foreign service officers themselves who are well placed to see how new developments in the world will affect Canada. It is part of our job, after all, to be the scouts and sentries for our country. I have the modest hope that this book will contribute something to public understanding and will also, perhaps, stimulate others of my foreign service colleagues to lend their hands to this task.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, pp. 13–14. Read the rest of this issue →
